skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This story is far less dramatic than the media is making it out to be. Short-sellers are a fringe group within the industry who often totally fail on trades (short selling is a pretty risky bet with an unlimited downside). This situation is definitely not monumental or new. Retail investors have been pumping stocks for the last 100 years. They contributed to the crash of 1929 and the dot com bubble, for instance. No they didn't have a subreddit to express themselves, they instead were driven by newspapers and pundits to direct their trades, but a similar premise nonetheless.
> With their heads in cloud nine, hedge funds tried to kill GameStop ($GME). They tried to squeeze it so much that it would suffocate and die. They didn't care about the people who will be out of jobs, unable to pay their bills, or even survive.

A low stock price doesn't, by itself, kill a business and put people out of jobs. Bad management kills a business, as does being in a bad business to begin with.

> Never in their wildest dreams, the hedge funds would have thought this day would come. The tables have finally turned as the hedge funds try to gulp in their last breath of air.

We're really not talking about "the hedge funds" in this case. Just a few hedge funds who, indeed, should've seen it coming. It's not like during the subprime crisis where every large financial institution had a large exposure to them. The exposure of the financial industry to GameStop is minuscule at the scale of the system. It's also not new, in the sense that sometimes hedge funds will try to squeeze one another too

> I honestly don't believe that people are going to sell their positions on $GME stocks. As I said, they are not in for the money anymore. They are fighting the good fight, and they have the potential to win this WAR.

Maybe they won't sell, but there are cases where fundamentals will catch up with the gamers. If/when the business runs out of cash and undergoes restructuring, the stockholders will be left holding pennies.

Maybe the CEO of GameStop (notice how he's been quiet?) will be like, f--- this job, I'm selling all my stock and retiring, thanks Internet
This.

In the 50' we used to see Science Fiction stories about robots taking the yoke of labor from our shoulders, to allow us all to live our better, truer lives.

Now that it's happening, all modern philosophers can think of is, How to get Everybody Back To Work! Like that is some end in itself.
rightfully -> understandibly
The shareholders own the shell company. It doesn’t change a thing.
Robinhood is not free. You are paying through PfOF. Just because you're not aware that you're paying more for your trades doesn't mean it's actually free. And, as others have pointed out, they have a version of their service which is paid and is exhibiting the same behavior.
This sucks when there are only three or four bars and they all have the same corporate interest.

Look at Visa going after porn and private sex work.

This entire culture of trying to control what others can say via deplatformization is neoliberal fascism.

Bad things get said. But free speech protects all of us from tyranny, and we have to defend it. Because they'll come after you and your ideas next.

Americans have thick skin, or at least most of us do. It's a consequence of our liberty, and it's a defining trait of our system.
She's part of the Democratic Socialist part of the party and their policies are definitely not mainstream within the party as a whole.
It's about the tendies. And you get tendies for loss porn as well as gainz.
There's supposed to be a law where the stock has to exist and be obtained before you can "borrow" it to short. The law was created in 2008 I believe but from what I understand, there are loopholes in it.

https://www.sec.gov/news/press/2008/2008-204.htm
Shorting is literally borrowing the stock and then reselling it, so a shorter is pretty analogous to someone renting and then immediately subletting an apartment (Yes, there's the rent/buy distinction, which is what leads to short squeezes, but close enough). To get past 100% short interest just means some of the subletters have sub-sublet.
Don't worry, we will take short cuts, because greed and ignorance, leaving them with agency we will not have accounted for.

Should be exciting.
>> The power brokers and people in actual control of SV are libertarian, not left.

Name one that is politically active, other than Peter Thiel.

>> And antifa is an idea, not a singular, cohesive group.

Citation needed.

>>The made-up-by-right-wing-news organized leftist group that..

..rioted non-stop for about nine months all across America and killed 25 people.

Fixed it for you.

>> Further, if you were an informed American, I'd hope that you would understand that those who tend to identify with antifa weren't (and by and large aren't) happy with the selection of Biden and Harris. Both are seen as defenders of the prison industrial complex.

Well, they might not like them too much, but Biden is an empty suit and there is always the prospect of The Squad getting more power in the DNC. And they absolutely hated Trump.
An obvious missing thought by John Lee here is that people would go for their hedonism at different ages depending on their expected years remaining.

If you told me I will live to 100, quitting at 70 to travel the world sounds ok.

If you told me I’ll die at 50, I will be retiring before that.

By prolonging life from 80 to 90, we also encourage people to retire later. So even if “meaningful” would mean “work” (and oh boy, it doesn’t) it still is important to to prolong life.

You can always trust an intellectual to not consider anything but first order effects I guess.
This was happening on yahoo finance years ago. Is it sad that the SEC takes an interest in such goings on?
Floodgap was part of this. I just talked to a very helpful person in NetSol's security department and she looked through the ticket. It was initiated by a web chat, and they produced official looking but completely fraudulent documents (photo ID, utility bill, business license, etc.) to prove identity, so this was socially engineered and apparently for multiple domains. They're supposed to contact me tomorrow for more on the post mortem.
To me that suggests they're kowtowing to short sellers and manipulating the market.
You can't expect a reasonable person to read the TOS. They have a reasonable expectation to get the same service as any other day, even if this conflicts with Robinhood's business model, unless Robinhood made their expected behavior abundantly clear in advance.
That mostly means that BlackRock customers have a long stake. BlackRock and other asset managers own the shares because they are part of the funds and ETFs that they manage for others. They are not really theirs.
This doesn't really answer the main question above. How is this not evidence of a corrupted market system?

Free market assumes that buyers can make their own decisions. This is a fundamental requirement. If you are "free" to decide something, but then your decision gets overridden when it doesn't suit a particular third party, you aren't really free. The mechanism of enforcement and excuses given afterwards don't change the fundamentals.
Back before the pandemic we would have tamale making parties, hang out with friends, make tamales, drink, eat tamales! That was a lot of fun!
> Well like I said... I enjoy history.

It totally looks like you don't. Are you sure about this sentence? Every other sentence seems to contradict this one.
> Loosely, market manipulation happens when you artificially influence the price of a stock, resulting in a personal gain.

Every purchase influences the market, and results in gain, otherwise people would not be buying, and selling things.

Every purchase, is a market manipulation by the definition.
What is "real economics" if law, contracts and supply/demand isn't real economics?

Stock price was never supposed to closely mirror company's financials, that's a meme pushed by socialists that want to portray the stock market as wrong ("out of reality"). The financials are merely a indicator. It's stock market and what matters are the dynamics of that market, and the company itself is only a small part of that.
Fakestagram – How bots and fake accounts simulate a vivid world in social media
Market maker: guy who makes money standing in the market all day so that when you come, you don't have to wait hours for a dude who wants to buy your shipment of pork.

Broker: offers you access to the market, and often lends you money as well. Needs scale, is often a lot of marketing, both in getting the customers, and in getting the customers to actually trade.

Hedge Fund: Umbrella term for an investment company that can do a very wide range of things. They can buy art, or fund litigation. Often we just mean they buy and sell stocks, and take some of the profits when things go well.
This is most likely the answer. They are taking on a lot of risk allowing this type of trading behavior. They likely don't have suitable risk infrastructure developed to feel like they have a handle on it, so they shut it down.
You don’t really get much of a choice on who you vote for, you just get to pick which of the two parties occupies your seat. We should eliminate parties entirely and just go back to a vanilla republic where you pick someone from your community to represent you. Repeal the 17th amendment, return the Presidential electors back to being chosen by the legislators, who are voted in only by the will of their local constituents rather than the blessing of the party.
As long as the HTML file is not minified, they're quite readable. <p>It's just plain text with some markup</p>.
Like everything, it’s a matter of degree.

Would I start a company to sell physical video games, in malls, in a pandemic? Hell no.

Would I short it to the extent that it the shares become ‘rare’ enough to induce a lot of demand? Also, hell no.

Both extremes are....not clever.
> It's offensive to minimize what happened on January 6th. That's what you do when you mock the notion that the president incited violence.

No, that doesn't follow.
The hedge fund(s) have billions of dollars of assets/investments. So they can buy a lot of stock and “shut down” (i.e. make -90% returns for their unfortunate investors) without actually going “bankrupt”.
From https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-01-25/the-ga...:

There are 100 shares. A owns 90 of them, B owns 10. A lends her 90 shares to C, who shorts them all to D. Now A owns 90 shares, B owns 10 and D owns 90—there are 100 shares outstanding, but190 shares show up on ownership lists. (The accounts balance because C owes 90 shares to A, giving C, in a sense, negative 90 shares.) Short interest is 90 shares out of 100 outstanding. Now D lends her 90 shares to E, who shorts them all to F. Now A owns 90, B 10, D 90 and F 90, for a total of 280 shares. Short interest is 180 shares out of 100 outstanding. No problem! No big deal! You can just keep re-borrowing the shares. F can lend them to G! It's fine.
My pet peeve. Trying buying good oven or induction hub without touch controls.

Why premium products are the ones using worse control system is beyond me.
Moderna has created a few billionaries:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/giacomotognini/2020/11/12/mit-s...
Many ORMs are going to have trouble at some point when you start making more complex queries. I believe using an ORM well is largely in understanding the balance between when its tradeoffs are acceptable and when they are not. Per the other reply, I would probably start with EF Core in new applications, but would not hesitate to add Dapper or just plain SQL with ADO if I saw the need.
Will Shopify significantly reduce the dominance of Amazon?
Brands have a challenge as they face white-labelling and brand death on modern Ecommerce marketplaces.

While Shopify fills a credible gap for small businesses, will brands use Shopify and similar platforms over listing on Amazon?
Is the better alternative, to create actual slaves? Intelligent feeling beings that we put governors on, like a Thrall shock-collar from Star Trek, so they don't get to uppity?

Because that's a horror show of its own right there.
> (I assume there are also some ad platforms)

We don't have ads yet because of the Google monopoly that leads to them not partnering with games with fewer than 1 million MAU. We plan to add ads. However, I want to migrate our business off the ad market. Ideas include merchandising. Please feel free to send me suggestions for migrating off, ideally without making the game toxic or addictive.
> Reddit doesn't like us? Let's just kickstart and crowd-source another.

There's Ruqqus which is already a working alternative to reddit. However, what I found going there is that there are a lot of anti-left memes being shared. Some amount of toxicity. I'm all for freedom of speech, but I wish the platform was a bit less political, a more neutral alternative to reddit... but hey, if enough people leave reddit, maybe it will become just that.

https://ruqqus.com/+Commentary/post/74iv/lol-you-thought-tha...
And who’s responsibility is that? WSB has been rallying around GameStop for over a month. It has 2 million subscribers. GME shows up 10s of times per day. There have been endless squabbles over it. If some rubberneckers come in now and lose money they could just as easily lost it by doing a thousand other silly things. TSLA and other meme stocks show that value is relative and fickle. We used to think advertising and social media were just used to tell people to buy a company’s products, but it is obvious that they are just as good for directly raising capital. Is it a capitalist utopia or a populist dystopia? I think it’s both.
> Income inequality self corrects through one of three mechanisms: war, revolution, or famine. Wealth of people under the age of 40 as a percentage of total wealth has gone from 19 percent to 9 percent in the last 30 years and this is effectively a form of revolution

How much of this is just the costs of college spiraling out of control combined with a larger number of people going to college? I graduated with 60k more in debt than my father from the same school 30 years later.

Also do people really care about age dependent income inequality? Because in time everyone under 40 will eventually be over 40.
I believe this as well. That's the reason why I have a triple-digit number tabs open, and haven't bookmarked a site in twenty years. I much prefer having only a single interface to manage, which for me is tabs. I suspect many others with a similar tab-count are the same.
Would love this jailbroken, a text dedicated device would be wonderful for coding, terminal emulation, even e-mail.
When you short a share, you borrow a share from someone who owns it and sell that share to someone else.

If the person who bought the shorted share lends it to someone else to short, one share has been shorted twice.
Pick your funds wisely. No one should have their next meal dependent on a weird short position. Read the risk prospectus for your funds and take it seriously.

There is little deception. Funds that take crazy risks will say so in their prospectus. There's no chance your S&P500 index fund is taking a huge Bed Bath And Beyond short position when no one is watching.
Entity A holds 100 shares and lends 80 to B, who shorts it by selling it to C, who lends 60 to D, who shorts it by selling it to E.

Now there are 240 long positions (100 A, 80 C, 60 E), and 140 short positions (80 B, 60 D), for a net 100 long, as before.

Short interest is 140/100 = 140% of the shares outstanding.
Trading through Royal Bank of Canada's platform has been down all morning.

https://financialpost.com/news/fp-street/rbc-online-banking-...
In the grand scheme of things, this (GME, AMC, etc.) is a really small pool of money at play.

For reference, the Norway Oil Fund [1] holds almost 1% of the world's stock which amounts to somewhere in the neighbourhood of 1 trillion dollars. So the overall size of the investable asset universe for pension funds is really large (real estate, private equity, hedge funds, venture funds, stocks, credit/bonds, etc.) and pretty much all well run pension funds have a diversification mandate so there's no concentration in one asset class.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_Pension_Fund_of_Nor...
Hey, crowd, you are not allowed to buy up the stock like that! Someone is gonna get hurt on the way down!

“Here let us help you” — closes down exchanges, panic sell — “isn’t that all better?”

People with their money stuck and unable to cash out... so much better eh?

I smell a huge class action lawsuit
Let's hope it also works for the platform economy (e.g. UberEats, AppStore, YouTube, ...)

Companies should not own or regulate entire markets.
I predict that we will see a law or regulation which will require that a person hold a license from the government in order to trade stocks, or certain securities. In every state there are laws that you must hold a license to perform certain tasks, so it's not inconceivable that the government will say: "This is too dangerous to let just anyone do, look what unlicensed, and untrained people did with GameStop. The government must require that only a professional licensed financial trader buy or sell stocks and securities."
1. It failed.

2. It was stupid.

3. It violated the principles of our society.

That is the point I’m trying to demonstrate. Solutions come from within, not without.
I'd also make the argument that it's easier to do with today's technology than when Stalin did it.
If so, it implies your original statement was entirely the wrong statement to be making.
Woo hoo, they arrived today!
shorting is identically borrowing. You borrow the stock from someone who owns it, and resell it at the current price. Then later down the road, you buy it back at the lower price and return it to the original owner. You have made money on whatever that difference is. This is not a metaphor, this is how shorting operates.

It can easily go over 100% if the person you sell it to also lends it to someone to short (and they have no clue that the share they bought was involved a short, already).

Note - this is why it's possible to lose your shirt when you are shorting. Eventually you will need to return that stock you've sold, which means buying it at whatever the price is. So if it goes WAAAY up, you lose a lot of money. In contrast to buying a stock, where you can only lose your position.
I have watched this mess from afar and the tone of the conversation has changed from "Hey, here is an opportunity to make some money off a mistake some hedge funds are making" to "Smash the system". Exhibit A - this idiotic article.

You cannot use the tools of the system to beat the system.

Here is the thing about hedge funds - they hedge. They hedge in the morning, hedge in the afternoon, eat some hedge for dinner and get in a few rounds of hedging in down at the hedge club before going to bed dreaming of hedges. The clue is in the name. They don't typically make huge loses or gains for a single stock, they are happy to make a consistent gain every day.

The vast majority of hedge funds are making stacks of small gains off this nonsense and anyone who doesn't cash out at the right time is going to be hosed. Do you know when the right time to cash out is? No? Sucks to be you.

Honestly I am worried. Mob investing has collapsed economies, brought down governments, and ruined more lives than can be counted during the last 150 years, and I don't see how this is different.

This is completely ridiculous and will all end in tears. I am actually glad that some pressure is being put on Reddit and the brokers to cool things off - there are opportunities to cash out big time but a lot of the small players are going to lose money.
Wealthy people games exist in bitcoin as well. Especially now with all the institutional investment and futures markets. I say this as a long-time bitcoin fanboy as well.
It's hard to not read this as a pathological corner case.
In my experience, it's often true that city water remains pressurized even when a snow-covered tree branch has taken out a residential power line. Obviously, if the grid is taken out by a hurricane or earthquake or something the whole region is offline, but that's pretty rare here in the Midwest, but freakish ice/snow/wind storms knock down some wires and cause power outages at least once or twice a year. Why we can't convince regulators and the utility to spend 30% more initial capital and bury all the gross power lines underground where they're safe, instead of stringing them through the forest using dead tree carcasses instead is beyond me, but the city water treatment plant is typically powered by larger, more reliable segments of the grid.

However, now that I have a private well, yes, it kind of sucks when power goes out and water doesn't work. I've got 40 gallons of hot water in the heater that I can drain, and between 10 and 30 gallons in the pressure tank in the crawlspace. More than enough to draw some off for drinking and cooking, and a few buckets for pouring in the tanks of (gravity-operated!) toilets.

Speaking of cooking, another utility that's surprisingly operable in a power outage is natural gas. I can cook on my gas stove (but not in my electric oven), heat my house with my gas fireplace insert (but not my forced-air furnace), and heat water with my continuous-pilot water heater (but not fill it with my well pump) because the buried natural gas pipeline is always, always at 2 PSI.
Now they made enemies of most of their clients. I bet not more than few weeks before you will see advertising from big shot lawyers on national TV welcoming you into class action lawsuits. Frankly, I am terribly disgusted by this news from Robinhood and I hope they will be sued into eternity... and then hopefully DOJ step in an see what they did was illegal. If you have Robinhood account, write you state AG. Show your outrage in writing so they can also get involved.
Absolutely! Telegram provides nice to have features like cloud message history, but those inherently mean it's less secure.

I actually wish Signal had a "trade some security for convenience" option like that.
Seems to me that there are multiple histories of computing . One is the history of theoretical computer science which I think is what Knuth is referring to. This is actually fairly well preserved in academia and anyone with a CS background should have gone through it. Another is the history of programming, of which we know the origins but off late has become nearly impossible to track. The last is the social history of the internet , which doesn't require a technical background.
Most of your tabs are probably things that you intend to read later, or want to keep around to refer to, or something like that. Each one takes up a big chunk of RAM, and either a few or a lot of CPU cycles, depending on your browser and what’s running on the page. Each one takes up some screen real estate and makes it harder to navigate among the tabs that you’re actively using. If your browser crashes you may lose some tabs and the information that they represent. You can’t use this information easily if you switch to another browser.

If, however, you turn these tabs into notes on your file system, all these issues disappear. Plus, you can use any software, or write your own, to manage this information. But how do you turn these tabs, conveniently, into notes? Well, just check HN now and then. Every few days there is a new front page story about another system to do just that. I wrote my own, and so have many people, because this is the kind of thing that one wants to work exactly a certain way.